The news: OpenAI’s “Frontier Alliance” with Boston Consulting Group (BCG), McKinsey, Accenture, and Capgemini reflects the reality that most enterprise AI adoption has reached deployment stage, not experimentation, per Reuters. OpenAI’s Frontier platform aims to help companies integrate AI across software development, sales, and customer service.

How we got here: Survey data from G2 shows 57% of B2B decision-makers already have AI agents in production, with another 22% in pilot and 21% in earlier phases. 

Yet adoption is not moving as fast as technology leaders want. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said resistance to “the diffusion, the absorption” of AI into the economy has been greater than expected, adding that progress feels “surprisingly slow,” per The New York Times.

The bottleneck is no longer AI models’ ability to handle complex business tasks. It is integration—connecting AI to enterprise data, workflows, and employee behavior. 

OpenAI is pairing forward-deployed engineers (FDE), or engineers who work with businesses to customize products in real-world environments, with their consulting teams. 

Consultants bring distribution: Accenture serves 9,000+ clients, McKinsey more than 3,000, and BCG and Capgemini similarly embedded across the Global 2000.

“Companies have realized that siloed AI deployments do not deliver the value and they don’t transform their company,” Denise Dresser, OpenAI’s CRO, told Reuters.

Zooming in: Consulting-led AI programs are becoming the enterprise standard layer—defining governance, controls, and operating models that scale across thousands of companies.

• Vendors now compete on business integration, not model performance alone.
• Consulting firms provide implementation scale, executive trust, and industry context that AI vendors lack independently.

The model mirrors early cloud adoption, where integrator partnerships accelerated enterprise migration.

The caveat: Ecosystem power cuts both ways. Business consulting firms outside the alliance could face slower deployment, higher costs, or weaker implementation.

Smaller AI vendors could also risk exclusion from large enterprise deals without comparable or aligned ecosystems.

Implications for brands: Enterprise AI is shifting into execution. Advantage will favor companies that embed AI across revenue, customer experience, and decision systems—not those running pilots.

OpenAI’s alliance with major consulting firms signals where standards and workflows may form. Brands should focus on integrating first-party data, automating measurable processes, and building internal capability to reduce long-term dependence on vendors that could create exposure to pricing changes, roadmap shifts, or platform lock-in.